Audrey Tautou’s Coco role

Audrey Tautou is set to play Coco Chanel in a film documenting the fashion designer’s life before she was successful.

The ‘Amélie’ actress will star in the $15 million movie, to be directed by French filmmaker Anne Fontaine.

Fontaine will be concentrating on Chanel’s childhood and the years prior to her ascension to fashion royalty.

Fontaine said: "I wanted to follow the interior path of this young woman who was poor, without education, but who had an uncommon personality that was ahead of her time."

The script was penned by Fontaine and Christopher Hampton and was freely adapted from the Chanel biography 'L'Irreguliere' by Edmonde Charles-Roux.

Shooting on the movie will begin in 2008, and is just one of a number of current projects focusing on the life of the visionary French designer.

‘The Exorcist’ director William Friedkin is working on a film about Chanel’s relationship with composer Igor Stravinsky, which will star Marina Hands in the lead role. Meanwhile, Danielle Thompson is also in the early stages of a Chanel biopic.

Chanel, who died in 1971, had such in impact on fashion she was included in TIME magazine’s ‘100 most influential people of the 20th Century’.